Part 17

If Lord Bacon wrote the plays, he must have conceived the female characters which invest them with such dignity and graciousness. To have done that required a comprehension of the varieties of the female disposition, such as could be derived only from personal contact and experience. To have seized some broad features of the plays, Bacon must have been acquainted with many degrees of social state beneath his own. We can trust Shakspeare in the tavern and its purlieus as frankly as we would the Persian poets, Saadi and Omer Khayam, who saw in the full cup a symbol of the divine afflatus. But we cannot imagine that Bacon was a frequenter of those London haunts where Dick the Butcher took his ale before Jack Cade decreed that the three-hooped pot should have ten hoops, and made it felony to drink small-beer; where Falstaff leered and tossed his ballast over in a sea of sack; where Parolles vapored, and Bardolph blushed, and Pistol's English grew tipsy; where Sir Andrew and Sir Toby roared catches, and Feste and the other clowns made excellent fooling into the small hours; where Bottom mildly exhaled at the head of the table at which Flute, Snout, and Starveling took their pots after the shop-shutters were up; where Dame Quickly maundered, and Mistress Overdone and Doll Tear-street made largess of their brassy smiles. A poet may convert the tavern-bench into a wool-sack: "This chair shall be my state, this dagger my sceptre, and this cushion my crown." But a Queen's Solicitor and future Lord Chancellor could not risk pawning the wool-sack for a tavern-bench. Even the gift of poetry would not have so badly endangered his prospects.

Bacon knew the wives and daughters of his friends and associates. He was at home in the families of the Pakingtons and Barnhams and Hattons. He doubtless noted the peculiarities of Lady Rich, Mistress Vernon, Elizabeth Throckmorton, and the other women of that crowd upon the steps of the throne. So many of these were cast in the same mould, that he would have been meagrely provided with female types, leaving us unable to account for the great range of character which fills the scene, from awkward Audrey to queenly Hermione, from Mistress Overdone to Imogen, from the Pander's wife to Marina, from Phebe to Perdita.

Moreover, search Bacon's writings upon this matter of knowledge of woman to find, if you can, hints and passages which are parallel with the plays in temper or language. Look for traces of that fervor which devotes the plays to the great central passion, and consecrates them with so many moods and styles of womanhood. Ransack his letters in vain for any deep consciousness of sex like that which makes every play personal and vital with something that cannot be put aside. Read his Essay on Love, and contrast its dry, pragmatic tone with the pages which palpitate with Juliet, or those over which Viola tenderly broods and Helena frankly shines. Can we imagine that essay to have been a treasured favorite of Desdemona, or to have beguiled Ophelia during the absence of her prince, or to have served Cleopatra except to hang on Antony's hook for a sinker, as for jest she hung the salted cod? Isabella might have safely furnished a copy of it to every nun in her convent; but Imogen, for all her "pudency so rosy," would not have taken it to bed with her, to read three hours and fold down the leaf where she left off. The warmest expression which Bacon was ever overheard to make is preserved in a speech in praise of love, written probably for a masque. The speaker says: "In the melting of a horse-shoe, can a mighty dead fire do as much as a small fire blown? In shaping metals, can a mighty huge weight do as much as a blow? It is motion, therefore, that animateth all things: it is vain to think that any strength of Nature can countervail a violent motion. Now, affections are the motions of the soul. Let no man fear the yoke of fortune that's in the yoke of love."

But the details which defend the Baconian theory are too numerous to be met and properly treated unless one had a volume's space at disposal. Each one is trivial; and the total effect of the theory depends upon a nice and patient construction of a cumulative argument, such as lawyers know how to use. Probably the majority of adherents to the theory will come from the legal profession, or from the class of minds that is trained to appreciate the importance of all the little points of some routine. But so long as the court before which this case is argued must have for judge a quick perception of the exigencies of the imagination, which include the delicacy that tests differences of intellectual structure and the broadness that adopts all vices, passions, whims, and humors, the details need not be separately pursued: their refutation, if still possible, is anticipated and made useless by the comprehensive verdict of an imagination that is kindred to the plays.

It is not entirely just to say that the contributions of men who favor the theory are specimens of literary futility. They are frequently valuable to the scholar of Shakspeare by throwing unexpected side-lights upon the plays: they also furnish suggestions to the interpreter. They have amassed a quantity of collateral information of Shakspeare's epoch which the critic will thankfully acknowledge as he uses it. The minute and laborious research which Judge Holmes has expended upon his volume, the literary, historical, and social parallelisms which he discloses, the philosophy and style of thinking of Elizabeth's age, put the lover of Shakspeare under obligation.

SHAKSPEARE'S WOMEN.

For many years before the time of Shakspeare, it had been customary upon the continent to assign to women the female characters of plays. But we do not find any trace of the employment of women upon the English stage till 1632. It is a mistake of Colley Cibber that no actresses had been seen on the stage previous to the Restoration. A French company that included women appeared in a play at Blackfriars in 1629, and were soundly hissed for this innovation upon British prejudice. In 1641, during the Puritan interdiction of plays, the actors drew up their "Stage-players' Complaint,"--"Our boys, ere we shall have liberty to act again, will be grown out of use, like cracked organ-pipes, and have faces as old as our plays." In 1660, a play was acted entirely by men. In 1661, the same play was acted with the help of female actors. After women had effected a lodgement upon the English stage, they still divided for a while with men the female characters. But, during the life of Shakspeare, squeaking tongues and downy cheeks used to "boy" the greatness of his female parts.

We can understand how this custom must have helped both the audience and the actors through the frequently broad dialogue of the coarsest plays of that period, where things and situations are mentioned with a frankness and precision which cannot now possibly be reproduced, except in the sugar-coated fashion of the Offenbachian revival. Women wore masks when they attended the theatre, and needed not to be at the expense of blushing. The slight disguise lent to them the illusion of being neuters in the crowd. The world was then unsqueamish and forced no scruples on the playwrights, whose coarseness differed from Shakspeare's in being lugged in for its own sake. His plots always countenance his freedom and adopt it. There is Shakspearean motive for every wanton page, as there is, too, genius in it, which other writers could not ape nor rival. Each feeling is so essential to the intercourse of his characters that he cannot disguise it: it is a state of nature that gambols like a child among its elders, more likely to be smiled at than reproved. The texts of the poet's frankness survive, but not as deliberate outrages to the modern womanhood which would fain not speak nor hear them; and they do not justify the expurgated editions which unfix them from their natural connections with the chastity and married honor involved on every page and in the drift of every play.

When his plots disguise female characters in the dress of boys and pages, it was more effectively done because his actors, thus resuming their natural mien, could so easily sustain the dramatic contrivance with the advantages of sex. And this is something which our modern female actors cannot imitate. At least, they do not appear to be interested to make the attempt, because they are misled by vanity to set off their little rounded waists and the feminine charm of figure and movements. Perhaps it is not vanity, but an instinct of womanhood, which lays this embargo on her mimic power.

An exception must be made of Mrs. Kean; for a play was always the thing to catch her conscience, and engage it to lend the utmost reality to the scene. As Wilford, in the "Iron Chest," she never forgot to assume the perfect stride and motion of a man; and as the disguised Viola, when the thought hit her that Olivia had fallen in love with her, she slapped her cap, and threw out her right leg with all the jauntiness of a boy, as she exclaimed, "I am the man!"

But, in general, the figure, gait, and instinctive movements of the actress continually betray the Imogen, the Viola, the Jessica, the Julia, the Rosalind, who may well say, "I could find in my heart to disgrace my man's apparel, and to cry like a woman." Portia says to Nerissa,--

"I'll hold thee any wager, When we are both accoutred like young men, I'll prove the prettier fellow of the two, And wear my dagger with the braver grace; And speak, between the change of man and boy, With a reed voice; and turn two mincing steps Into a manly stride."

But, when Shakspeare's smooth youngsters reassumed their characters as women, how the great poet must have been inwardly fretted with the incongruous presentation of the tone of masculinity in each passion, of the boy's smutch on the bloom of each emotion, the elbows wearing ragged holes through delicate sentiment, the scraggy shoulders and strong collar-bones working out of every tender phrase! He was forced to see a Cleopatra without "the entire and sinuous wealth of the shining shape" that held

"A soul's predominance I' the head so high and haught, except one thievish glance, From back of oblong eye, intent to count the slain."

It was Antony's Egypt without the fine malice and insinuation, stripped of the abjectness of her love which, grovelling for pardon at having wrecked her lord, makes him arrest her heart again to indemnify him for all his fortunes that had gone to pieces; as he answers to her cry for pardon,--

"Fall not a tear, I say; one of them rates All that is won and lost. Give me a kiss; Even this repays me."

Could all Shakspeare's training have infected a boy's imagination with Juliet's ardent frankness, which tipped those lines with the sparkle of first love, and launched it from the balcony into the night, to be one star the more? And what boy or man could have returned to Shakspeare that motherhood of scorn which whitened the lip of Constance,--could have picked up and handed back to him the gauntletted verses of her defiance? His imagination must have wilted in that dryness of the actors; it was a limbo for the infants of his soul, out of which they never graduated: the tender grace of Perdita, doting over flowers as if they had natural instincts like her own, which ought not to be dismissed but rather claimed; the moan of distracted Ophelia, using flowers for tokens; the airy coquetries of Beatrice and Rosalind; the concealment preying on the bud of Viola's cheek; the gathering madness discharged in showers of pity on Cordelia's; the fell chastity of eye which made Iachimo's looks peruse the ground. All the distinctive temperament in the gestures, tones, allusions, of Shakspeare's women; all the difference of sex to which the verses strive to connect each emotion as it rises, to hold it a moment on the face, to detain it in the eyes, to send it scurrying by; that struggle of shyness with desire, the tremor of a heart that has a secret threatening to climb into sight, the anxious reticence that reaches to pull it down; the love that whets itself upon ambition's stone to the point of murder, and makes its hands of one color with the husband's; the swaying, queenly gait, the sinuous arms that would embrace when words were done, as Hermione descends slowly from the pedestal; the impromptu charm of Miranda's modesty when she would not wish any companion in the world but Ferdinand; the reverie of Desdemona, as she unpinned her dress to the tune of "Willow, willow, willow," and started at the wind, thinking it was Othello's knock, expectant but bodeful,--all the generic traits which differentiate Shakspeare's women from all the other women of literature, according as women themselves naturally furnish those traits, could never have been personated by any man.

How fortunate it is for a grateful posterity that it has been enabled to repay to Shakspeare a portion of its heavy debt to him, by committing his female characters to women of various talents and temperaments, some of whom are the brightest offspring of their age! Could he have foreseen, when the women of his fancy were consigned to the beardless tenors of London, that the true woman would eventually route these wretched eunuchs, claim the scene, appropriate her own verse, and infuse the whole unsuspected genius of her sex into his conceptions, to give them new births in the travailing of her bright endowments? That was a perfect forecast of the imagination which, with only youths for actors, whose chief advantage was the callowness upon the cheek, could have written the parts which have laid an attachment upon the finest women of the last two hundred years, and taxed all their passion, wile, and infinite variety. He must have written in a divining sense that Nature, piqued by the revelations of her deepest mystery, would have to summon at length its representatives to mediate, and, taking these things of heaven, show them unto men.

In some respects, the conceptions of Shakspeare have not found the later actors and actresses to be profitable allies, in so far as they have put a private stamp upon their favorite characters, and have levied duty upon his fancy that prefers free-trade even to direct dealing clear of middlemen with every heart. So does every sect hang over the great stream of the Bible, see its own face reflected there, and languish for it. Shakspeare's pages surprise actors with their own temperament, and make them long to embody it. So that our Shakspearean impressions are decided for us, and descend to our children through the style or school of great histrionic families, in the same way that congenital traits travel out of the past into the future: the traditional studies of great theatrical performers propagate themselves. Their excellences cannot be ignored, and they quite plausibly vindicate themselves as pure Shakspearean intentions. We accept these renderings, and soon become disturbed to have them challenged and displaced. It is a great but willing tribute which we pay to the genius of the artist when we confide the imagination of Shakspeare to his interpretations; just as we despatch our diamond to be ground and set. He sends it back to us flashing from facets which describe his individual skill.

But, in consequence of this genial submission of the spectator to the impressive portraiture, there arises a prejudice that Shakspeare could not have conceived otherwise, and that the character cannot and ought not to be repealed. In this way, for instance, some famous women have accustomed us to a Lady Macbeth who is full of grandeur, in whose solid and sombre person a suppressed cruelty smoulders. The verses protrude like claws of tigers; they clutch and rend: you may expect to overhear the lapping. The lower jaw of this conception is too square: the teeth of it are too relentlessly closed upon a victim. There is not an unoccupied space on cheek or brow where love can colonize; for all the space is pre-empted by a ravin to glut a lust for power. The woman's husband is only a lackey who must be whipped with scorpion phrases up to the deed that makes a queen of her. She detects a flavor of the milk of human kindness in him; and it makes her scowl till she shrieks to have the ministers of darkness turn her own milk to gall. She is the woman to carry back the daggers with the bluff composure of a butcher, and hoping to find that Duncan still bleeds, so that she may gild the faces of the grooms. You would not come upon her rampaging at midnight with a candle, rubbing at imaginary stains, and conning her secrets with fixed glassy eyes; for she is firmly constructed to know the blessedness of a bed and the balm of being conscienceless. Of such a wife Macbeth might well have said, "She should have died hereafter;" but she would not have found any time at all for such a weakness. I cannot discover the Lady Macbeth of Shakspeare in this too robust delineation.

Another kind of misrepresentation has issued from another quarter whence it should have been least expected. Some of the noblest women of modern times have filed a complaint against Shakspeare's women, and brought them into the court of the latest ideas, charged with the crime of being characterless, mere puppets of the will of the dominant sex; not the tutors, indeed, but the feeders of his riot, complaisant creatures who accept the purpose of the universe to keep men supplied with love, and whose most prominent traits are those which protect and confirm the union of the sexes. It is alleged that Shakspeare "never foretold a better woman than he saw," because "he lacked an ideal of humanity and life:" he withheld from her the personal consequence which belongs to strong individualities who detach themselves from their age to view, scrutinize, and remodel it. It is astonishing to read what Mrs. Farnham,[16] whose life was most unselfish and heroic, has said about Shakspeare's ideas of women, that "he authorized in his sentiments all manner of passional, sensual, and drunken usurpation of man over woman, every kind of force to degrade her which the law did not punish; and only felt bound to satirize and speak coarsely of _her_ after it had been exercised; men, who repeated such experiences never so often or basely, being no less heroes for his dramas, fit to lead in council, rule in honorable war, and receive the homage of society. The leading characteristics of woman, as he portrayed her, are sensuality, and fickleness, its uniform attendant in either sex; capriciousness, vanity, desire to be loved, more for the power than the pure happiness of it; a disposition to exercise that fleeting, petty power tyrannically,--so far, to play the man on the child's scale; weakness, helplessness indeed, against temptation, and a paramount selfishness which is only modified, or very rarely turned into generosity, towards the man whose love permits her to love in return; for which, and chiefly, in its narrowest, most material sense, she seems in his estimation to have been created."

It is not possible to misread the plays of Shakspeare more profoundly than this. They have been viewed in the color of some exclusive ideas concerning the nature and the mission of woman, in whose advocacy the writer spent a noble life. Not finding in any of the plays precise statements that reflect the most advanced sentiments upon the Woman Question, and discovering that Shakspeare was neither morally nor politically a partisan, and that neither position nor reflection impelled him to anticipate modern ideas on social subjects, the writer declares that he was not the poet of woman because he was not her prophet. A criticism more destructive than this of the Shakspearean delineations cannot be made. In fact, no _doctrinaire_ of ethics, politics, theology, can suitably approach Shakspeare with a critical purpose.

Nature seems to have draughted many of her women in the mind of Shakspeare before she embodied them to play their parts. Already there existed Antigone, Medea, Electra, and the ensky'd Beatrice; but these did not exhaust her capacity of womanhood. They seem only sketches of a few single features, portraits of isolated qualities that waited to be combined. Medea was the hate of a mortified and neglected love; Electra was the unsleeping persistency of a daughter's revenge; Antigone, the divine constancy of a daughter's affection; Ismene, the weakness of a common mind; Alcestis, the extravagant submission of a tender wife: they are all single strings of the old Greek lyre, never tuned to sweep into a perfect octave. The note which Alcestis emits is merely her willingness to die. Imogen sounds the same at the command of a husband who suspects her honor. But it wakes the harmony of other strings, and we listen to a chastity that is as spirited and deadly as it is submissive; to a love that is as eager as it is refined; to an honesty that exposes the discord of double dealing by chiming with a simplicity that scarce knows how to suspect; to a purity that is as unconscious as a girl, while it is as haughty as a man. The chords are rich and solid, and support the theme of her character through all its movements.

So women began to exist for the first time in literature. Shakspeare discovered woman, and took note of her generic peculiarity which upholds the specific differences of individual women. They all came forth to him as surely as flowers to the sun. He solicited each jealously interfolded sheath, and drew out of it the heart of its color. All of them are rooted in the common ground of sex; but each one lifts into the blossom her signals of a temper and modulation that are peculiarly her own. So that, although "each woman is a brief of Womankind," she is also a woman who must be designated by some one of Shakspeare's famous names.

In fact, genius was never penetrated with the varieties of woman's temperament till Shakspeare, picking up a few rustic specimens in Stratford, ran away with them to London, taking down there honest, red-fisted Audrey; Phebe, the village coquette, a little above her condition, who reads and quotes tender love-lore, and learns to despise a swain; Mopsa and Dorcas, doting on ballads, watchful after pedlars to chaffer with across the hedge for tapes and ribbons; and Juliet's gossipy, free-spoken, easy-minded Mrs. Gamp. With this humble retinue, his imagination travelled down to the great city, and seemed to have introduced them soon, past all the barriers of etiquette, into Elizabeth's circle of ladies, where they went into the service of high-born qualities, and retailed to him the very heart-secrets of their mistresses. The dames of wealthy citizens sat in full costume for his "Merry Wives;" the noble partners of his friends and patrons yielded each to him a whisper of their chasteness, their high-spirit, their control, their tenderness.

"In the blazon of sweet beauty's best Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,"

he mastered Beauty of the form and soul, and gave to each her portion, from Imogen to Cleopatra,--

"The worser spirit, a woman color'd ill."